


The Most Perfect Princess

by 221b_hound



Series: Guitar Man [103]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Gen, Princesses, Sherlock spoils his kids, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, novelty sheets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-05
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-03-05 12:31:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3120269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Ford and Violet both want the princess duvet with matching tiara pillowcase, Sherlock is the one to buy them a set each. In fact, he ends up buying a lot of novelty sheet sets for them over the years, until that time they discovered the appalling, non-licenced set on a Chinese website...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Most Perfect Princess

**Author's Note:**

> This whole fic was prompted when I saw the Princess duvet and pillowslip set on display in a shopfront over the holidays. I immediately thought that Ford would want one, and that if he wanted one, Violet would want one, and then I thought about the princesses in that family...

Ford fell in love with the duvet cover and pillow set at first sight. The pretty princess frock on the white linen; the pretty princess tiara on the pillow. He wanted desperately to lie on that manchester and bat his five-year-old eyes at his mother from under the picture of the frilly frock, his dark curls surmounted by a crown. He remembered that Mary and Rupe said Sherlock had Pretty Fucking Princess Hair and he wanted to show once more that _he_ had Pretty Fucking Princess Hair too.

Sally was reluctant to buy the bed set, and Mycroft wanted his son to learn restraint (and also to reacquaint himself with the virtue, as he was at great risk of simply giving Sherrinford anything he ever asked for).

Violet was also in love with the princess bed set but Mary was reluctant to buy it on account of it being such a pink and princessy bed set, and Rupe had reservations about the cultural and gender stereotypes it reinforced. John just thought it was cute, and was on the verge of buying it for Violet when Sherlock and bought a set for each of the children. Who adored them and giggled at them and took them to one another’s house for sleepovers.

They’d parade about whatever halls were handy, tiara pillowslips around the crowns of their heads, princess-frock duvets draped cunningly over their skinny bodies. They took turns at being princesses who rescued dragons, princes who happened to like dresses, and dragons who ate royalty and waved the frocks of the thus devoured monarchs around as trophies. 

Six months later, Sherlock bought each of them the racing-car duvet sets they suddenly coveted: Ford’s car was orange with an orange helmet painted on the pillow slip; Violet chose a green car, having seriously misunderstood an overhead conversation about green-powered cars.

The next year, Sherlock listened to the coos of desire expressed at the Billy the Martian bedding sets. Ford slept under Billy the Martian and his helmet while Violet plotted schemes under the mad-scientist garb of Doktor Fangor’s lab coat and mind-control skullcap.

As the years went on, Sherlock often deduced ahead of the excited cooing which matching bed sets the kids were after, and they amassed quite a collection. The last ones he bought, though, were when Ford was 12, Violet 13, and they found that Chinese website full of ugly and bizarre goods that were by no means licenced by the copyright holders. He nearly didn’t buy them, except that he knew that there was no escape. If Mary saw these things, she’d doubtlessly buy them for the kids herself. (He had no fear that John would do the same, a theory borne out by the look of horror on John’s face when the things arrived).

Violet and Ford hooted with tweenaged laughter, though, as they tore open the wrapping to reveal the last and greatest of their bed set acquisitions. One duvet bore the image of a long grey coat and a bright purple scarf, while its matching pillowslip depicted a deerstalker (Sherlock couldn’t decide if he was most offended by the hat or by the scarf being the wrong colour). The other duvet showed a sort of 1940s baggy suit teamed with a stethoscope and the pillowslip was adorned with a flat cap. The result looked like a kind of Jimmy Cagney medical gangster. (John was too flabbergasted to speak at first, but finally expressed himself with an explosive _what the fuck-arsed, dog-pissing chimp bollocks is **this**?)_

Naturally, Violet seized upon the faux-Sherlock set while Ford gleefully hauled the was-it-even-Watson? set home. (Mycroft laughed so hard he cried. Sally just kept blinking at it like it hurt her eyes.)

But that wasn’t the end of the whole Bedding Thing, oh no. Because after the arrival of the knock-off Chinese Detective Holmes and Baggy Doctor Watson sets, somebody, who shall be nameless, but who used to be in the army and is the one who, in fact, taught his daughter and her best friend how to short-sheet a bed, used to play mix-and-match with all these sets which resulted in the Detective Holmes duvet being matched with the tiara pillowslip nine times out of ten (and the Baggy Doctor Watson duvet with the Doktor Fangor skullcap pillowslip at least five times of ten).

And the day that Sherlock came home to find that Violet, now 17, in cahoots with Ford and Mrs Hudson, had reclaimed the threadbare images from the old sheets and appliqued them onto a new pillowslip and duvet for his own bed?

Well, on _that_ day, with marvellous dignity, he wrapped the duvet around his semi-dressed form, took the pillow out to the sofa and proceeded to meditate on his latest case (or, as Violet, John and Ford liked to call it, ‘falling asleep in his mind palace, like Sleeping Beauty) until roused (or ‘woken up’) by his children and his best friend giggling fondly and taking photos that they shared with no-one – but sent him as text messages and random times of the year when they were far from home.

(Sherlock knows that John knows that Sherlock keeps the damned thing in a trunk upstairs in the Sussex cottage, and that John pretends to not know that he wraps himself in it some summer days when John’s in town, shopping. Sherlock sits on the back porch, swathed in the princess duvet, tiara pillow between his greying head and the cottage wall, and watches the bees and… ‘meditates’.)

**Author's Note:**

> The story title is from the Disney song Every Girl Can Be a Princess. They obviously forgot that every *person* can be a princess. Especially if they have princess hair.
> 
> The first reference to Sherlock's Pretty Fucking Princess Hair is in [ 'Imperfect is the New Perfect'.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1226128/chapters/2512447)
> 
> And this is the princess bedding set: http://little-circus.com/products/princess-duvet-cover-pillow-case


End file.
